Month: October 2017

It’s the time of the year for the LibOCon gathering! The 7th edition of LibOCon was held in Rome, Italy from October 11 to October 13, 2017. The beautiful city of Rome gathered many LibreOffice contributors at Capitol Hill. As a tradition, our team was there and gave several talks. (more…)

Cambridge, United Kingdom – October 9, 2017 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, is excited to announce a new release of its flagship enterprise-ready cloud document suite – Collabora Online 2.1.4, with new features and multiple improvements.

The Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) has been updated to version 2.1.4 as well.

What’s new in Collabora Online 2.1.4?

The following features and improvements are new since Collabora Online 2.1.3:

Spell checking support

In Writer, Calc and Impress

New Tools -> Automatic Spell Checking option to turn the spell checking on and off

New Tools -> Language for selection, Language for paragraph and Language for entire document submenus in Writer

These allow the users to create multi-lingual documents with Collabora Online easily. One sentence in English, and the other in German? No problem!

Status bar indicates the current language

Improved user experience of the startup

Menu and toolbar show already before the document is loaded

Easier High Availability handling

Now all the requests that need to end up at the same node have a WOPISrc= URL parameter, it is not necessary to examine the URL path any more

WOPI

PutFile now provides two custom request headers:

X-LOOL-WOPI-IsModifiedByUser – true/false indicates whether the document was modified by the user when they saved it

X-LOOL-WOPI-IsAutosave – true/false indicates whether the PutFile is a result of autosave or the user pressing the Save button

RPM and Deb triggers

Update systemplate when new versions of system packages are installed

Several smaller fixes

Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) 2.1.4

Together with the release of Collabora Online 2.1.4 we will also release version 2.1.4 of the development edition of Collabora Online: CODE. The development edition is aimed at home users and contains the latest and greatest developments. We want as many people as possible to try it out and get back control of their own online documents. We’d also love to get people involved in our efforts to make LibreOffice Online even better. Download the Docker Image, enjoy using it at home and why not participate in the project too!

For more information on CODE, and info on how to get it, please check out our CODE page.

Over 1.5 million docker pulls!

Collabora Online continues to grow at an amazing speed! Not too long ago the Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) reached 1 million docker pulls – now we have over 1.5 million pulls! Get your own docker image from https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code/ and check out https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ for more details on how to integrate this image if your favorite File Share and Sync solution.

Online demo

You can get an online demo of Collabora Online and try it out yourself right now!

About Collabora Productivity:
Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, providing a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specialising in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

We are looking forward to the LibreOffice Conference 2017, starting on October 11 in Rome, Italy! Just like at the previous LibreOffice conferences, there will be talks from people that work at Collabora Productivity, talking about LibreOffice desktop and Online development, new features, security, testing, use cases and a lot more!

You can find more detailed info on the talks from Collabora, ordered by date and time, below:

Filing better interoperability bugs – from users to development

An essential aspect of LibreOffice is that it can work with documents coming from other office suites. During that, however, we are bound to run into interoperability issues. This talk aims to give techniques that can be used by end users and QA people alike to take a closer look at these issues and process the documents causing bugs, without much information about the formats (eg. to create minimal examples), to provide more relevant details to developers in the bug reports.

LibreOffice Code Overview

The LibreOffice code-base is huge. Finding the relevant source code for your bug or feature can be challenging initially. The talk will walk though a number of key modules in our codebase and will give a brief summary on them. Also code documentation techniques used in our code (doxygen, per-module README files) will be presented as well. Come and see how to get from the user interface to the relevant source code, what still lacks documentation and how you can help.

Quantum computing with VBA

VBA, the programming language of Excel and other Microsoft Office programs, is also interpreted by LibreOffice with more or less success. Among others, the company D-Wave, the world’s first quantum computing company, decided to use LibreOffice for running their VBA script, using its VBA support. The talk will walk through the improvements made on LibreOffice in order to be able to run the above mentioned macro and improve the efficiency of interpreting vba scripts.

LibreOffice Online – new features since the last year

LibreOffice Online is an exciting technology that allows people to edit documents and collaborate on them in a web browser. It is rapidly developing, and has improved a lot since the last year. Come and see all the new exciting features that did not exist in the LibreOffice Online one year ago – like the collaborative editing, user friendly comments, resizing cells in spreadsheets, and much more.

Pivot Charts

Pivot charts are a new feature available in LibreOffice 5.4, which introduces the ability for charts to use the output of the pivot table as its source of data. With pivot charts it is very easy to visualize the data and extract the desired information by modifying the pivot table. This talk explains how to create and use the pivot charts, and the experience during development.

Per-Paragraph Signatures in Writer

As security becomes increasingly more important in a highly digital world, signing and validation of digital documents becomes critical. This talk presents a new feature that allows the signing and verification of individual paragraphs in Writer using a cryptographically secure certificate. The signatures are stored as RDF metadata in the document and visually represented by text fields, which shows the signer, date and validity state.

Per-Improved interoperability of Writer’s features

Presentation of newly implemented features which are improving interoperability with other office suits. Including: DOCX AutoText import, custom Watermarks, better handling of embedded documents (OLE) and solved problems in the Writer with developer’s comment.

Mail merge Writer data source

A group of users got used to select name and address data for mail merge from a table in a text document, in another office suite. When these users were migrated to LibreOffice, they wanted the same feature, but it was missing. The presentation will show the details how a Writer data source driver was added to connectivity module of LibreOffice.

Native comments and change tracking support in LibreOffice Online

An overview of the journey of moving from the tiled comment rendering in LibreOffice Online to native comments in javascript with the help of comments API exposed by LibreOfficeKit. We’ll also look into native change tracking support making your experience of editing and reviewing documents much more smoother.

LibreOffice Online Extensibility

LibreOffice Online is an exciting technology that allows people to edit documents and collaborate on them in a web browser. LibreOffice Online can be integrated into any web service simply via a combination of an iframe and the WOPI protocol.
To make the integration smoother, there are various extensions possible, like adding your own buttons to the toolbars, reacting on various events from the LibreOffice Online, or using some handy WOPI extensions. Come and hear what is possible, and how to achieve the level of integration you need.

Tunneling dialogs to LibreOffice Online

This talk would discuss how instead of reimplementing the same functionality available in various dialogs by writing thousands of lines of code in javascript, we are routing the dialogs from LibreOffice core to LibreOffice Online. I’ll talk about the implementation, routing to LibreOffice Online, and present a demo of the current state. Towards the end, we’ll look into future improvements, scope and further challenges.

Unit testing in online

Come and hear how we do unit testing for Collabora Online – vital if you want to add a feature, or implement a fix. Understand how the system of ‘hooks’ allows cheap, yet invasive message & fault injection. Understand the several layers of old & new testing methods, and see how you can get involved.

OOXML support maintenance

When I meet with users in person the most frequently mentioned issue is that LibreOffice (LO) messes up Microsoft Office (MSO) documents. Well, I understand how frustrating it is, but let’s talk about why it’s this hard to be compatible with MSO. In these days OOXML formats are used most often, so it’s important to have our OOXML filters upodated.
I’ll speak about my experiences about working with OOXML filters. I’ve done some development with different LO components during the last year, so I’ll bring examples from these different areas (Writer, Impress, Calc). The OOXML support of LO has limitations, sometimes it comes from missing features, sometimes it comes from the bad design of filter code. While showing the examples I’ll mention where the code can be improved, what issues you should be aware of while developing this part of the code and also mention some entry points for interested developers.

Approaching the 1M columns / rows limit in Calc Online

The goal of providing to the user the ability of working with a 1 million rows spreadsheet in Calc Online requires several improvements. Some of these improvements have already been achieved and involves special handling of the row/column header, scrolling and document navigation. For row/column header that means fetching only the header heighs/widths for the current visible section of the document. This feature improves both document loading time, minimizes data traffic between the core and client and more responsive row/column operations, such as insertion, deletion or resizing. In this talk will be illustrated how this result has been achieved by the synchronization of header data fetching with mouse/key scrolling and through caching the current cell position.

LibreOffice in a UK Hospital

Come hear a case-study of how LibreOffice was deployed in a UK Hospital. Hear how the project was planned, the cost-savings, the trials and successes, the benefit of real support – with new features & bug fixes implemented, improving LibreOffice for everyone.

Making Calc Calculate in Parallel

It seems clear that in the future computers will become more powerful not so much any more by increasing the per-core processing power, but by increasing the number of cores available per processor chip. To take advantage of that in LibreOffice Calc, doing large formula group calculations in parallel is an obvious solution. Earlier, increased parallelism has been approached through the use of OpenCL. This has worked in some ways, and in other ways perhaps been less succesfull than was hoped. This talk describes a new approach which uses plain C++ level multi-threading.

Brute force clang plugins

If we place nice with the hardware, it will make our lives easier. In the old days, we expended considerable effort to make our global analyses more efficient, especially when dealing with large codebases like LibreOffice. However, with the advent of modern hardware and software tools this has become largely necessary. This talk will focus on some pragmatic design choices that lead to being able to run global analysis passes across the LibreOffice codebase, without breaking the bank on hardware or waiting days for results.

How to stop blocking and learn to love non-blocking sockets

The challenge of converting blocking sockets to non-blocking in the production-ready LibreOffice Online, while maintaining quality and stability, was met for the 2.0 release earlier this year. This talk is an overview of the journey from discovering the limitation of blocking socket, and the mechanisms and methods used to build a non-blocking framework and converting the codebase over. The details of how the highly threaded, thread-synchronization-laden design was de-threaded into a simple, single polling-thread model, with callback-scheduling, ownership, life-time management, and thread-affinity is presented.

LibreOffice: SharePoint integration. A year of progress

The talk is targeted to discuss the previous state of the SharePoint support in LibreOffice, the issues that were solved during this time, and some of remaining problems/goals that LibreOffice is still facing.

A year in LibreOffice’s PDF support

The LibreOffice PDF filter got multiple updates during the past year. The introduction of PDF signature verification, signing existing PDF files, rendering PDF images with pdfium and various general PDF export fixes all happened in this period. A new testsuite has been added to catch PDF export regressions early. The talk will walk through a number of situations where improvements have been done and present the results. Come and see where we are, what still needs to be done, and how you can help.